


documentation of the perils of women

by n7punk



Series: Outside of the War - She-ra canon stories [5]
Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, F/F, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, POV Third Person, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-15
Updated: 2020-07-15
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:40:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25269235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/n7punk/pseuds/n7punk
Summary: Adora keeps a diary. She logs down the new things she learns, the memories she wants to hold on to, battleplans she needs to develop, and scrawled confessions in the margins.(No actual diary entries or italic sections, cuz I can’t read that shit either).
Relationships: Adora/Catra (She-Ra)
Series: Outside of the War - She-ra canon stories [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1793227
Comments: 13
Kudos: 305





	documentation of the perils of women

**Author's Note:**

> Seriously, I'm dyslexic af so this fic does not contain italics except for emphasis, and no actual diary entries, just the thought process around them.  
> This whole story was inspired by the kind of Dear John-style letter that Adora writes to Catra in her journal (I think around season three). That, plus also somewhat being based off my own experiences using journaling to track memories/abuse/PTSD. There are some distant references to child abuse, but I tried to keep it vague for everyone’s sake.

The book is the fourth gift she is given upon moving to Bright Moon. On the first page she marks out a list of them.

  1. Gold pin.



Adora has always fastened her jacket with her cadet badge. After her promotion she had replaced it with her new Force Captain badge. Neither are really acceptable options for her to wear anymore, even if she still had them.

The new clothes are a necessity, not a gift. They can’t have someone wandering Bright Moon’s palace in a Horde uniform, after all. Glimmer asks what they should get her and she says she does not know – that she already knows how to fight in what she is wearing now. A quick trip to the tailors and she has a few sets of close replicas on the way, the only real difference the Horde symbol on the back. In her efforts to help Adora adjust, Glimmer even has the tailor make undergarments like the ones issued in the Horde. While they wait for the new clothes to arrive, Glimmer loans her some old sleep clothes that were too tight for her and hang a bit loose on Adora’s shoulders, but during the day Adora finds herself clutching her jacket closed in a fist, ever-aware of the Horde symbol hidden under the stretch of red cloth at her back.

Glimmer notices, if only because she tries to hand Adora something and Adora drops it while trying to balance it one-handed. Adora doesn’t even remember what it was anymore by the time she writes the entry – just that it got chipped when it met the floor, but thankfully remained unbroken. Adora fidgets, apologizing, twisting her waist belts around her fingers while Glimmer scrutinizes her. After a moment, Glimmer makes a little “Aha!” noise of victory and poofs away. Adora is left staring at empty space, blinking as her mind races, trying to find where on the scale from “minor scolding” to “exile from Bright Moon” that mistake had been. She stands there, alone, for so long she has settled firmly on “finding out where exactly the prisoner cells are” when Glimmer pops back into existence before her, waving something gold and sharp in front of her.

“What… are you doing?” she asks, noticing how Glimmer seems a bit more disheveled now than she had when she disappeared. Glimmer steps close to her, entering her space in a way she is only really used to Catra doing. It still makes her nervous, but she swallows her anxious tick as Glimmer reaches out to her.

“Sorry that took me so long, I could have sworn it was in my vanity, but it was still pinned to an old cape in my closet – can you believe it? – anyway-“ Glimmer launches into her tirade, apparently having gotten bored of waiting for Adora to take the hint and reaching down to grab her hand, dropping the golden glint into it. “- it’s a pin! To keep your jacket closed, so you don’t have to hold it all the time. Although I guess when your new clothes get here you don’t have to wear it anymore, but now if you want to, you can still fasten it with this!” Glimmer beams up at her. In shock, Adora looks down at the small, golden wing in her hand. It glints in the light and she stares at it, unblinking, for several long moments. It is only after she notices Glimmer has fallen silent that Adora realizes how frozen she has been. Jerking up, she meets Glimmer’s eyes and sees only concern and warmth there, a hint of sadness tinging her gaze.

“… Thank you,” she breathes. She squeezes the pin tight between her fingers before reaching down to fasten her jacket closed.

Even after her new clothes arrive, she does not stop wearing the jacket – her first real material gift, and her only one from back in the Horde – or the pin that fastens it. Despite the Horde-style compression clothes she still wears, she feels the pin is just a little piece that brings her closer to this beautiful new world she has discovered beyond the walls of the Fright Zone.

  1. The new bed.



Like the clothes, her bed practically _should_ have been replaced after she broke the first one, but Adora knows exactly how that scenario would have gone in the Fright Zone. If the average cadet had broken their bunk, they would likely be forced to sleep on whatever wreckage remained or just sleep on a blanket on the floor for quite a while. If Adora had broken her bunk she just would have crawled up into Catra’s. Though now that Adora thinks about it, Shadow Weaver probably would have blamed Catra for sleeping in her bunk instead of her own for so long, putting undo strain on it and until it finally broke, whatever the final catalyst ended up being.

Shadow Weaver had always been so needlessly harsh on her. Why wouldn’t she come with Adora? Why did she not want to leave that behind?

Adora’s pen punctures a hole in the page as she writes the entry. She tries to focus on how nice the thought behind the new cot had been.

  1. The sleepover.



It was not a material object, but neither were any of the gifts given between friends in the Horde. It was something that could be done, big or small, to make one of your friends happy, or at least make carrying out their duties easier.

Adora cannot fall asleep alone – but she also can’t _stay_ asleep alone. Dreams clutch at her mind when she tries, ephemeral and slipping away through her fingers by the time she wakes. She knows they are unpleasant, mostly. Dreams about committing horrible acts with Horde – about being dragged back to do it or, worse yet, finding out she already has without knowing it. Dreams about bad days that actually happened – memories, if you will, rattling around in her skull and demanding to be reviewed suddenly. Sometimes, the dreams are soft and golden. She never remembers what happens in those dreams – just knows that they leave her heart aching when she rouses from them.

Bow and Glimmer sleep with her off and on for the first few days, maybe even weeks, until they go away on their first mission to rekindle the Princess Alliance. After their presence eases her into her new home, sleep starts coming easier.

Unfortunately, so do the dreams, and eventually, Adora starts to remember them all.

  1. This book.



Bright Moon has a huge library. Adora had caught a glimpse of it a few times – once on the first tour they had done of the castle, and couple times since then as she has made her way from place to place. It is not until two weeks in that Bow gives her a proper tour of it, after he mentions birthdays in passing again and she has to remind him she doesn’t know what that is. Bow shows her the fiction, the non-fiction, the history books, and the essays.

“I think these will be most helpful to you,” he assures her, leading her to a shelf that is almost bowing under the weight of objects stacked upon it. “Biographies! They are books containing real people’s life stories. You could learn most everything you need to know about day-to-day life in these. Sure, you might not know when Salineas gained independence, but we can get there eventually!” he assures her before fixing her with a deadly serious look, “Birthdays are more important than the date of Salineas’s independence.”

Adora has spent her whole life studying and training. Now instead of battle strategies and weapon types, she learns about marriages, craftsmen trades, and poets. The books help, but they can only help so much – they just assume so much is already given knowledge. Adora always has to read with a dictionary by her side, flipping to the section “D” for “divorced” as she finds a new word she does not understand.

She confesses in Bow that she has trouble keeping track of it, and three days later her proudly presents her with a new book. Leather-bound, simple with no declared title or author. When she opens it, she is surprised to find it empty.

“It’s a diary!” Glimmer explains, excitedly. She had practically been jumping while she was waiting for Bow to give Adora her present. “Bow made it himself!”

“You can _make_ books?” Adora asks, awestruck, as her fingers run over the empty pages. Bow shrugs.

“It’s just a little something I picked up from- ah, it doesn’t matter,” Bow dismisses humbly, blushing. “You can use it to write down anything you need to keep track of, or just to work out your thoughts and feelings on paper, or to log what you did in a day! A lot of biographers start by looking at someone’s journal entries over time.”

She has Bow and Glimmer explain it to her a few more times, but eventually she understands. She knows what she thinks she wants to use this book for. And so she outlines her first entry, laying on her stomach in the bed as night begins to fall outside.

She writes about the gifts she has received; about the strange way life carries on here. She draws a crude map of Bright Moon castle, at least the pathways through it she can remember off the top of her head, and snaps the book shut when she finds herself writing the words “I miss.”

She loves her new friends. She thinks she could love Bright Moon. But it isn’t home, not yet. She doesn’t trust it, not with these thoughts.

\--

She reaches a compromise in her entries, eventually. When she needs to, when she feels the weight of her hazy, golden dreams after waking in the middle of the night, she opens the book and writes somewhere in the margins of the last entry:

_I miss you._

She never says who the _you_ is. She knows, and no one else needs to be privy to this weak, selfish part of her.

\--

Adora tries to keep battle plans out of her diary, instead regaling those to their own separate pieces of paper so she does not have to carry the journal around the castle, risk showing the wrong entry to the wrong person. Sometimes preliminary versions start in its pages – sometimes even finished ones do – but she always tries to copy them to a loose leaf of paper so she may shove her book away, hidden deep in the vanity she rarely uses, thoughts safe from prying eyes.

No one else reads her diary. She knows this. Still, sometimes, when she wakes from a dream of golden sunlight, soft touches, soft _purrs_ , her fingers twitch for her pen and she forces herself to still them. She writes all her other dreams down, keeps careful track of the memories as they surface and are thrown into sharp relief in the new light of life in Bright Moon, but _those_ dreams are not meant to be logged. She wishes she could push them from her mind, forget they ever left her gasping with loneliness in her too-large bed.

\--

She carries the diary with her whenever she and Glimmer and Bow travel overnight. Bow smiles at her brightly whenever he sees her sit down and pull it out. He never asks what she uses it for, and she is grateful for that. The truth is, if he had asked, she would not have an answer for him.

It _is_ a diary. She is familiar enough with the concept now and knows that the book fulfills the definition. It is also war planning, notes about everything she can remember on strategy from Horde training jotted down, just in case she finds the techniques employed against them in an upcoming battle.

In some ways, it is a creative endeavor. She draws in it, sometimes, clumsily but with purpose. There are several pages dedicated to bad attempts at producing sonnets like the poetry she has read before she quickly gives up on building that particular skill. Rhyming is stupid, anyway. She will leave singing to Swift Wind and Sea Hawk with his shanties.

It is also a memoir. She writes about memories as they come bubbling up to the surface, often in the dead of night. She confesses to the blank pages she does not always know if the things she remembers are real or just fictional dreams.

Some of the memories are bad. She writes about every single thing she saw in the crystal palace. She starts to log times when she can remember Catra returning from Shadow Weaver’s chambers with her mane frizzed, eyes skittish. She writes about the times where in a few words Shadow Weaver tore her down to her core. But she also ensures she logs the good as well. She writes about a prank she and Catra played on Rogelio, even though he didn’t really deserve it at the time, but the memory of Catra’s gleeful squeal at its successful completion makes her smile. She writes about the Inciting Incident that started all the “blame Kyle” jokes.

She writes about the first night when Catra, shaken and scared after a confrontation with Shadow Weaver, had curled up in Adora’s bed instead of her own. How they would always wait until the other cadets were asleep before Catra would slip off the top bunk and join her, terrified of getting caught seeking comfort.

\--

Adora is very careful to only write true things about Catra. It is harder than it should be. She knows, even now, there is a door there she cannot open. That if she does she will see golden light, wild hair, roaming hands that _aren’t real, never had the chance to be_. She knows those dreams come from somewhere, and she has long been able to admit to herself that she has a desire for Catra. It took longer to admit, privately, that she loves the other girl, even still.

But never in the way she wanted to. That door remains shut tight.

Sometimes she will write a rant down after she meets the other girl on the battlefield, or even after fights with bots where she never sees her at all, but knows that lurking somewhere in the Fright Zone, she is calling the shots hurting other people. She wonders if that hurts Catra like it hurts her – wonders what it is, these days, that is making Catra hurt.

 _Because Catra, I can see you’re hurting_ , she writes one day, mind wandering for a long moment before she gapes at the page, realizing her fatal mistake. Two careful years, and she gives away in one line the _you_ behind every scrawled _I miss you_ in the margins.

Adora slams the cover shut. In a fit of self-loathing, she throws the book across the room. She ignores the ink staining her hands, ignores the dawn light starting to filter through the window, ignores that she is still in her night clothes with no shoes. She storms out of her room, chest heaving with heavy emotions she cannot say, not even to herself, breath coming in gasps as she bolts down the brightening castle halls. She just has to reach the stables, call out for Swift Wind. He always answers when she really needs him. The dawn, the wind, some loop-de-loops will clear her mind.

\--

The book is almost full, Adora realizes one day with panic. She flips through the remaining blank pages, counting nearly a dozen of them, and feels her heart sink. The book may have caused her pain over the years, but it is also the only place where she has dared to voice a lot of things that she knows, deep inside, needed to be acknowledged.

Her early entries are careful, catalogued knowledge. They give way to frivolous entries about her day and feelings. Later, they are slowly supplanted with battle plans, dream logs, and frantically scrawled memories. Eventually, emotional tirades begin to fill the spaces between war logs.

Now, every time her fingers twitch for her pen, she stills them, considering if the storm in her mind is really worth sacrificing one of her final pages. She never considers asking for another book. It had been a gift, a truly generous and kind one at that, and one does not ask for gifts. She has plenty of loose paper to draw out diagrams and map territory lines should she need – the only reason to rely on a book is the shroud of protection and anonymity the covers provide.

She needs that anonymity. But the Rebellion is taking blows, she and Bow are far too busy to bother with something as silly as _bookmaking_ , and Glimmer has the weight of an entire kingdom on her shoulders. Adora forces her fingers to still when they twitch, and when that does not work, she forces herself to stand out on her balcony and take in the sunset for a moment, trying to quiet her raging mind. It almost works. It _is_ working, until her eyes catch a scrape mark on the top of the railing of her balcony. It could easily be exactly that – a scrape mark, perhaps from a pot or planter that has since been moved. It could even be damage from some stray shrapnel dating back to the Battle for Bright Moon. It does not matter what it _is_ though – Adora’s thundering heart makes out claw marks in the hewn stone.

Frustrated, she sighs and turns to find her pen. Looking out at the orange sunset from her desk, so similar to all the ones they shared back on their secret platform, she finally admits to herself why all her dreams of Catra are golden. As she fills the last page, she binds the book closed with a hair ribbon she finds in her vanity, and tucks the book beneath her bedframe. Out of sight, out of mind. Besides – her heart hammers whenever she imagines someone else finding and reading it. The truth is never written on a single page inside - but the collective work gives her away. Her secret will be safer, tucked out of sight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Inciting Incident is, I feel, like the Spaghetti Incident from Calvin & Hobbes. Always referenced but never explained. The only people who need to know the details were the ones there. Shadow Weaver doesn’t even know all the details because she sincerely _does not want to_. It is such an in-joke they don’t even need to reference “the Incident” anymore – they just reference Kyle. I also think Kyle does find it kind of funny in a self-deprecating way. He knows he fucked up there.  
> Also I know Bow dismissing historical dates is probably against everything he was raised to be, but _birthdays_. And yes, his dads did teach him bookmaking. It seems very Bow to me.  
> The next two chapters are in a pretty different style just because there isn't an actual diary and they are shorter.

**Author's Note:**

> The Inciting Incident is, I feel, like the Spaghetti Incident from Calvin & Hobbes. Always referenced but never explained. The only people who know the details were the ones there. Shadow Weaver doesn’t even know all the details because she sincerely _does not want to_. It is such an in-joke they don’t even need to reference “the Incident” anymore – they just reference Kyle. I also think Kyle does find it funny in a self-deprecating way. He knows he fucked up there.  
> I have a sort of follow-up to this in "a moment of weakness", the second work in the traces miniseries (linked above, just hit next work). I also did a piece that was supposed to be a similar exploration of Catra but ended up being very different, so I haven't gathered them. That fic is called "written word" if you want to see what Catra did instead of a diary, though.


End file.
